Manhattan Rare Book Company

AN EXTENSIVE ARCHIVE DOCUMENTING THE CREATION OF ONE OF THE MOST IMPORTANT PROJECTS OF JASPER JOHNS’S CAREER, INCLUDING A FINE COPY WITH IMPORTANT PROVENANCE OF THE COMPLETED BOOK.

Preserved by Véra Russell, the editor who conceived and directed the project, the archive documents the creation of Foirades / Fizzles (Petersburg Press, 1976), widely regarded as the most important artist’s book of Johns’s career and among the defining livres d’artiste of the postwar period. Through correspondence, photographs, proofs, production records, and Russell’s own working papers, the archive traces the project from conception to publication and beyond, revealing how Johns transformed what began as a proposed literary collaboration into a monumental work shaped almost entirely by his own artistic concerns. Throughout Johns’s career, language most often appears as a public artifact: flags, numbers, alphabets, maps, newspaper fragments, and other signs already circulating in the world. In Foirades / Fizzles, however, the attention shifts from language in public space to language in private space. The archive shows Johns becoming increasingly absorbed not simply by Beckett’s texts but by the conditions under which those texts would be read: the reuse of certain plates between a piece’s English and French text, their placement on the page, and their physical presentation in the book. Few surviving archives document so closely the making of a major Johns print project.

CONTENTS SUMMARY:

The book — Foirades / Fizzles (Petersburg Press, 1976), Véra Russell’s own Artist’s Proof (XXIII/XXX), signed by Beckett and Johns. Limited edition, numbered XXIII/XXX [this being one of only thirty Artist’s Proofs, from a full edition of two hundred fifty numbered copies and twenty Hors Commerce copies individually dedicated], edited by Véra Lindsay [Véra Russell], illustrated with 33 etchings, two of the double-page examples in colors, 13 by 10 inches, housed in its original linen-covered clamshell box with purple silk tassel, the lining with color lithographs by Jasper Johns, text in French & English, the paper watermarked with the initials of Samuel Beckett and the signature of Jasper Johns, handmade paper by Richard de Bas, hand-printed by Fequet & Baudier in Paris, the binding conceived and executed by Rudolf Rieser in Cologne, protective tissue-guards throughout; IN FINE CONDITION. Petersburg Press, 1976.

Véra Russell correspondence — Her retained correspondence, principally with Johns (13 letters) and Beckett (8 letters), and various others including Paul Cornwall-Jones, Jim Knowlson, James Cuno, and Leo Castelli

Jasper Johns correspondence — Eleven letters to Russell, 1972–1981, tracing the project from inception through publication and exhibition

Samuel Beckett correspondence — Twelve autograph notes (10 with envelopes) and one autograph letter signed, 1966–1984, together with a typed letter, unsigned, of 23 Nov 1973 on the choice of texts.

A.J. (“Con”) Leventhal correspondence — Fourteen autograph notes and letters, 1972–1976, further documenting Beckett’s side of the collaboration.

Editorial & production archive — Trial title-pages, production notes, and the six-part Outline of Project, together with several working drafts of the book’s Justification leaf in French and English, annotated with autograph corrections, and Cornwall-Jones/Petersburg Press correspondence on planning, production, and distribution

Photographic archive — Eight photographs of Beckett and Johns together, and twenty-five further photographs (eighteen black-and-white, seven in color) of Johns producing the etchings, together with fifteen color slides. Eleven of the photographs are by esteemed French photographer Robert Doisneau and stamped verso “Doisneau-Rapho”; the remainder carry a “Prudence Cuming Associates Ltd” stamp

Miscellaneous materials — The Petersburg Press prospectus for the edition; an inscribed presentation copy of Beckett’s Pour Finir Encore (Les Éditions de Minuit, 1976); two Hermathena offprints featuring Beckett, one inscribed by Leventhal; a letter from the critic John Russell, Véra Russell’s former husband; and period newspaper and magazine cuttings.

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A SINGULAR SURVIVAL:

Few archives bring together a major artist’s book, the complete run of correspondence behind its making, and the working papers of the editor who conceived it. Foirades / Fizzles marks a distinct turn in Jasper Johns’s graphic career, and the present archive is, to our knowledge, the most complete record of its creation. Johns’s letters rarely appear at auction; a decade-spanning run of his correspondence, alongside Beckett’s own hand and Russell’s retained papers as the project’s originator, is rarer still. In 1991–92, Russell herself offered her files for consideration by the Beckett Foundation; biographer James Knowlson corresponded with her warmly on the subject, but the placement never went through, and the material has remained together, substantially as she kept it, until now. Beneath the story told most visibly here — an unlikely convergence of two giants of late modernism, yielding a new chapter in Johns’s career and one of the most celebrated artist’s books of the century, uniquely documented in the present material — lies a quieter one: Russell’s own. It is a story of perceived erasure, a slight that this archive goes a long way toward redressing.

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Price: $145,000 .